ABSTRACT
Several moral theorists have argued that empathy is the primary precondition for moral performance.1 This view has also been taken up in moral education, particularly in terms of attempts to map and cultivate the capacity for empathy and the other-regarding emotions in children.2 In this chapter we advance the view that the prevailing conception of modern subjectivity, with its prioritization and privileging of the autonomous self, is an obstacle to the generous effluence of empathy, and that a more robust conception and practice of empathy might be afforded by a reframing of the traditional self-other binary. While the resistance to modern subjectivity has become somewhat of a hallmark of postmodern philosophical discourse, there is not much sign that this change has significantly affected our everyday reality: the world is still by and large entrapped in modernist individualism. This is not surprising if we consider how deeply the historical roots of autonomous, egoic agency have infiltrated the modem psyche; and it is evident in the fact that we usually assume a biological and psychological necessity to this conception of selfhood. But such a sense of necessity is dispelled when we realize that there are other possible forms of subjectivity and moral agency. The example that Dissanayake gives of a Sinhalese Buddhist village in Sri Lanka illustrates our point:
Rather than conceiving of human agency as solely individual-based and person-centered, the villagers in Sri Lanka whom I studied made me realize that agency can and does manifest itself in and through networks of interaction… Human agency, so far from being the product of atomistic and isolated persons, can be the outcome of a group-centered ethos and orientation. (Dissanayake, 1996, p. xiv)
We propose here to explore two alternative forms of subjectivity: Emmanuel Levinas’s prioritization of the Other and the Buddhist deconstruction of the egoic self.3 Though coming from two very different cultural and intellectual traditions, they nonetheless stand on common ground-the rejection of autonomous, egoic agency in favour of a more mutual, relational conception of agency. In this chapter, which is the fruit of our initial discovery of each other’s moral paradigm, our exploration will focus more on this common ground than on the differences between the two. However, it is not our intent here to suggest that we replace the modernist conception of subjectivity with the Levinassian or Buddhist conceptions. Rather, we offer these models as tools to be taken up in the ongoing inquiry into possibilities for moral agency. But, first, let us problematize modernist subjectivity, by which we mean both to complicate it historically, so as to make us see that it is not a simple, solid fact of our psyche or biology (it is far more unstable than that, as we shall see), and, also, to indicate that there are moral difficulties with the notion. To this end, in the next section, we shall present a brief genealogical account4 of the modem conception of the subject as it has evolved over the last 400 years.5
